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Grim News for a Paper in Jersey

Friday morning was a glorious one in suburban New Jersey. At 6 a.m., the heat of the morning leaked in through the window, accompanied by the huge racket of cicadas thrumming in unison. It was the kind of morning where someone might be tempted to just lie there pretending to sleep, but then another sound came: the thwack of fresh, hot newspaper hitting the sidewalk.

The Star-Ledger delivery guy hits our block early, before the other newspapers arrive, usually dropping a hefty package jammed with localism writ large: wise-guy arias, street crime novellas and big investigations into the issues facing northern New Jersey. Under the sure hand of its editor, Jim Willse, The Star-Ledger is both modern — big and pretty with strong photos, navigation and graphics — and a throwback to the days when the most important story was the one just down the block.

In short, it’s the kind of newspaper that can get the laziest reader out of bed.

Friday’s edition was no exception. On the front, a report on the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision that jokes about religion are as actionable as jokes about sex, rested easily with a lighter piece about how Jersey beach towns are forgoing parking revenues to entice day trippers who might be staying home because of the high cost of getting there.

Inside, the crash of a flight from New Jersey got serious treatment, as did the last-minute salvation of a 140-year-old hospital. Still deeper, there were unsolved murders, a brownfield that became a recreational gold mine, the affirming of the conviction of the murderer of Shani Baraka, the daughter of poet Amiri Baraka, and the sentencing of a middle-school teacher who had molested a student. As on most days, it was a compelling real-time portrait of a state that otherwise lives as a punch line.

But there was also an article on the front in the left-hand column that seemed to imperil all the other journalism around it:

“The owners of The Star-Ledger announced yesterday they will sell the newspaper if they cannot win union concessions and persuade a large number of nonunion, full-time workers to take buyouts in the next two months.

“The owners set a deadline of Oct. 1 for getting 200 of the newspaper’s 756 nonunion full-time employees to take a buyout and for achieving the union concessions,” suggesting that the paper’s non-union reporters and editors might be leaving in droves. In addition, the company wants union mailers and truckers to agree to concessions by the same deadline.

The article went on to quote Donald E. Newhouse, president of Advance Publications, as saying that the cuts are necessary because The Star-Ledger, along with its sister paper, The Times of Trenton, had been losing $30 million to $40 million a year. The causes included a familiar litany of ailments, including the cratering of classifieds, department store consolidation and the flight of ad dollars to the Internet. Mr. Willse was quoted in the article as saying he was still confident he could put out a good paper with the loss of one-quarter of his staff.

Sitting in his office on Friday afternoon, Mr. Willse said that he was not “mindlessly optimistic,” but that the paper would not let up reporting on a state so rich with news that he compared it to a “game preserve — you don’t even know where to start.”

“But the bald fact is this newspaper can’t stand on its own two feet now and something has to change,” he said. “I told the staff yesterday that the problem we are suffering is like the plague. It is sweeping through our business and you can’t expect beneficent ownership to ignore what is going on.”

He sat in his office, looking out at Jeffrey Mays, a young City Hall reporter who had done an article about the expenses of the departing mayor, Sharpe James, which got the feds interested, which led to a trial on charges involving a real estate deal and ended in a sentencing last week that blew up in a huge fight between the judge and the prosecutors, every inch of it covered in The Star-Ledger. “He is just getting going,” Mr. Willse said of Mr. Mays, “and if he isn’t there doing that work, if he’s not able to take care of his wife and family, that story is not going to happen.”

The company can’t just cut willy-nilly, because it has promised no layoffs in exchange for keeping unions out of its news-gathering operation. And the threat of a change in ownership is something most employees never contemplated. “We are all just staring at each other and wondering what to make of this,” said one, who feared that being quoted by name would create problems for her at work.

This is the place in the column where the knowing scold would point the finger at the evil, greedy owners and talk about their relentless pursuit of profits above all else. That’s some other column. The Newhouse newspaper chain, which also said last week that it would shut down its news service in Washington after the presidential election, owns 27 newspapers and has managed to maneuver through the past few years of downturns without brutal cuts or a major diminishment in journalistic ambitions. It has also invested in papers to the point where many of them are regional standouts, including The Oregonian in Portland, and The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where it financed and supported the paper even as many businesses — much of the advertising base — deserted the place.

Still, telling employees to agree to a buyout or be sold to the highest bidder seems like a cold way to negotiate. But Mr. Newhouse said he had no choice.

“What has happened in New Jersey is far beyond what has happened in any of our other markets,” he said. “It simply cannot be sustained by us or anybody else.”

He is confident that an accommodation with the employees will be reached, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy.

“This is the reality that we face,” he said. “The perfect storm. And it shows no sign of letting up.”

On Sunday, a fat-looking Star-Ledger showed up, seemingly stuffed with inserts and ads, local sports and cultural coverage, prompting my wife to suggest, “It’s like a ham sandwich, it’s so thick, with lettuce, pickles and onions.”

It may still look like a sandwich, but some of the meat is about to go missing. Tom Moran, the political columnist of The Star-Ledger who retired earlier this year, shudders when he thinks about New Jersey, with its history of public corruption, without a fully-armed Star-Ledger looking over its shoulder.

“At least we could embarrass them and occasionally, the people would vote the bad guys out,” he said. “It’s a sad story not just for my friends who work at the paper. But for the state of New Jersey, if this continues, the bad guys will have a lot less to worry about.”